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Use of Robots.txt file on a job site

We are performing SEO on a large niche Job Board. My question revolves around the thought of no following all the actual job postings from their clients as they only last for 30 to 60 days. Anybody have any idea on the best way to handle this?

Before coming to SEOmoz I used to work for OntargetJobs which is a company that has multiple niche job boards. Here's what I would recommend:

Keep those pages followed because people *will* link to them and you want to preserve as much of the link equity as you possibly can. So how do you do that?

Make sure that when a job expires (or gets removed, whatever) that the page gets 301 redirected to the category page the job is posted under. Depending on the niche, it may be locale based, in that case redirect it to the location. The idea here is to send the user to a helpful page for good user experience and conserve some link equity at the same time.

On the page that gets redirected to, program it so when a redirection happens that it displays a message at the top of the page. Something along the lines of "Oops! The job you were looking for is no longer active. However here are similar jobs in XYZ category"

Again as I mentioned above, this is a good way to help user experience, plus keep some of that link equity from the inevitable links job posting pages get.

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